This disclosure relates to the field of computer systems. More particularly, a system, apparatus, and methods are provided for reading from a multitude of web feeds that publish content at different rates and/or with different frequency.
Web feeds, such as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and Atom feeds, are mechanisms for publishing content to interested people (subscribers) without requiring them to visit the source of the feed (e.g., a web site, a blog) and manually access or retrieve the content. A source of electronic content, such as a newspaper, a magazine, a blog, or other publisher, may offer any number of web feeds, for different topics, different media, etc. A subscriber typically uses a feed aggregator, a feed reader, or other specialized software to retrieve and present the content, although a web browser may be able to be configured to provide this service.
Different sources and web feeds publish content at different rates or with different frequencies. As a consequence, if a subscriber checks a given feed on an irregular or infrequent basis, he or she may miss any number of content items published since the last time the feed was checked.